5

Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?
Reflections on Obscenity in Contemporary
Indian Popular Discourse

Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

Introduction
In the era of globalisation, post-liberalisation India witnesses a simultaneous
increase in sexually explicit media representations and liberalising norms of
conduct for men and women (at least in urban settings). Yet at the same time, the
rise of the Hindu right has spurred a politicisation of the connection of ‘Indian
culture’, morality and decency against alleged obscenity. From the early 1990s
onwards, controversies around film songs like ‘Choli ke piche kya hai’, films such
as Bandit Queen (1994) and Fire (1998), the Miss World pageant in Bangalore in
1998, M. F. Husain’s nude paintings of Hindu goddesses1 or repeated agitation
against Valentine’s Day celebrations—such as the 2005 attacks in Meerut parks
on couples2—have brought the debate about obscenity repeatedly on the agenda.
Research in this field shows that the key issue is not simply the censorship of
images themselves but also the question of audiences: must they be protected
because of what they understand, what they feel or what they might imagine?3
Obscenity and discourses of nationalism are entangled in varied ways. Within
the Hindu-nationalist rhetoric, obscenity, constructed in opposition to morality
and sexual purity, is closely tied to notions of nationalism as the ‘forbidden’ that
1
T. Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial
India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 245.
2
C. Brosius, ‘Love Attacks: Romance and Media Voyeurism in the Public Domain’ in S. Srivastava
(ed.), Sexuality Studies (New Delhi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 255–86, 266.
3
W. Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Durham, London: Duke
University Press, 2013).
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 90  Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

threatens ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’. Obscenity, in this line of argumentation, is

anti-national. The term ‘anti-national’ signifies a divergence from an imagined
national identity, based on assumedly fixed Indian cultural values and a shared political
past and present. In the Hindutva imaginary, this national identity is conceived
as sanitised, monolithic and ahistorical, and it is enacted through appropriate
speech and deed. Karnad argues that the terms ‘anti-national’ and ‘anti-Indian’ were
used to accuse government critics during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (1975–77).
He traces a historical pattern of linking political criticism and opposition with
alleged ‘foreign involvement’ to accuse the unpatriotic, the anti-national. He finds
a repetition of these strategies in the contemporary political scenario.4 Controversies
around student leaders and professors of progressive educational institutions like
the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi or the recent arrests of so-called
urban Naxals5 are just the tip of the iceberg. According to the nationalist taxonomy
of the Hindu right, ‘Adivasis in central India, Dalit students, Left intellectuals,
human rights activists, a certain religious minority [Muslims], anti-nuclear
activists, beef eaters, non-haters of Pakistan, inter-religious couples, homosexuals
and labour activists are anti-nationals.’ 6 Karnad rightly asks ‘[w]hether the charge
“anti-national” tells us more about the people accused, or about the people who
make that accusation.’7 Historical and contemporary incidents indicate an almost
synonymous usage of the terms ‘anti-national’ and ‘anti-Indian’. In response to this
argument of anti-nationalism, a liberal Indian past is frequently invoked, usually
with references to erotic temple sculptures or the Kama Sutra.
The law regulating obscenity appears to occupy a middle ground between these
two poles and is, at least in theory, designed in order to balance freedom of speech
on the one hand and the interest in a protection against harmful obscenity on
the other. A subliminal risk of law favouring censorship instead of freedom of
speech is thereby always present. Boyce argues that ‘[i]n articulating standards in
obscenity cases, constitutional courts have cast themselves as guardians of national
moral and cultural values’.8 Laws regulating obscenity exist in various countries,
4
R. Karnad, ‘Meet the Original Anti-Nationals’, The Wire, 31 July 2018, available at https://thewire.
in/history/emergency-protests-sangh-parivar-anti-national, accessed 22 January 2019.
5
Harshvardhan, ‘From Anti-National to Urban Naxal: The Trajectory of Dissent in India’,
NewsClick, 18 September 2018, available at https://www.newsclick.in/anti-national-urban-naxal-
trajectory-dissent-india, accessed 22 January 2019.
6
G. Sampath, ‘Who Is an anti-national?’ The Hindu, 17 February 2016, updated 18 October
2016, available at https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/Who-is-an-anti-national/article
14082785.ece, accessed 22 January 2019.
7
Karnad, ‘Meet the Original Anti-Nationals’.
8
B. Boyce, ‘Obscenity and Nationalism: Constitutional Freedom of Sexual Expression in
Comparative Perspective’, The Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 56 (2018), 681–749, 685.

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 Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?  91

but scholarship has demonstrated that their enactment in the form of censorship
increases in times of political contestation over national culture and rising
nationalism. Gupta has exemplified this for late colonial north India.9 Thus, the
law can be misused in order to suppress dissent as well as to sustain discrimination,
stereotypes and, eventually, inequality. As Kapur argues, Indian laws regulating
sexuality are based on a paternalistic approach, especially towards women, and, thus,
perpetuate patriarchal structures.10 Media, as this chapter attempts to illustrate,
reflects, renegotiates and influences prevailing social structures. Hence, discussions
over the ‘right’ Indian approach to sexuality, the existent laws and the correct or
wrong application of these laws in terms of censorship, surveillance or the demand
for banning certain activities are important sources in order to unravel the complex
underlying dynamics.
While previous research has explored the legal aspects of obscenity, popular
discourses remain underexplored, although they accommodate the entire spectrum
of the ideological debate and frequently comment on forces that give sustenance to
an unequal social system based on patriarchal structures and sexual negativity. This
chapter attempts a contribution towards filling this gap by accessing exemplary
popular discourses through the lens of new media. It does so by setting the
discussions around two discursive events against the backdrop of legal regulations
of obscenity in India. The first guiding question hereby is how understandings of
obscenity in legal discourses differ from those in popular discourses. Second, this
chapter explores how in popular discourse both sides of the spectrum in order
to legitimise their views on sexuality invoke nationalism and cultural arguments.
Third, I suggest that notions of obscenity in India are highly gendered. This may
be largely attributed to an overarching patriarchal social framework, but this
assumption is further supported by the observation that the idea of female purity
takes a central position in Indian nationalist discourse and is often understood as
analogous to the purity of the nation.11

 9
C. Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India
(New York: Palgrave, 2002).
10
R. Kapur, ‘The Prurient Postcolonial: The Legal Regulation of Sexual Speech’, in B. Bose and
S. Bhattacharyya (eds), The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India
(London, New York: Seagull, 2007), 235–54; R. Kapur, Erotic Justice. Law and the New Politics of
Postcolonialism (London, New York: Routledge, 2005).
11
P. Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in Kumkum Sangari and
Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women. Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1999), 233–53; Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community; K. Poggendorf-
Kakar, ‘Virtuous Mother, Virile Hero and Warrior Queen: The Conception of Gender and Family
in Hindutva’, in M. Pernau, I. Ahmad and H. Reifeld (eds), Family and Gender: Changing Values in
Germany and India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003), 179–95.

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 92  Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

I suggest that an underlying assumption of explicit sexuality as alien to Indian

culture forms a connection between the legal and the media-based popular
discourse fragments that will be analysed here from a comparative perspective.
To examine this connection and interrogate the questions posed above, I take up
two miniature case studies of highly medialised events in 2015: the temporary ban
on online pornography and a hotel raid on Aksa Beach in Mumbai. I juxtapose
these ‘popular’ online discourse fragments with the rather static and state-created
content of laws. Methodologically, I employ a media discourse analysis approach.
I understand both cases as media events with strong discursive impact within
an ongoing media-based discourse on censorship, obscenity and the idea of
Indianness. The first example tells the story of a temporary porn ban in 2015 and,
thus, looks particularly into media censorship and the outcry it generated across
social media. The second case interrogates the censorship of (public) behaviour by
taking a closer look at the discussion around the Aksa Beach hotel raid in Mumbai
in 2015. These cases interlink directly with discussions on legislation, since in both
incidents legal provisions were employed (and contested) that regulate obscenity
in order to uphold rules of morality and decency. This chapter examines whether
and how in these cases the allegedly obscene material or behaviour is constructed
as anti-Indian.
Media is definitely one significant area of discourse formation in any society.
Traditionally, media is closely associated with the political system; the major
broadcasting agencies in many countries are state-controlled. India lifted its state
monopoly on radio and television only in the early 1990s. Critical discourse analysis
enables the researcher to read between the lines, especially where media censorship is
strong, which is the case in India. Within such media environments, social network
sites and blogs often become important sources of critical journalism. Media
coverage, thus, not only ‘reflect a society’s other discourses, institutions and social
practices, but also influences them’.12 Schäfer critically evaluates how theoretical
and methodological approaches developed in a Western European context are
applicable in non-Western regions. She argues that media observations always have
to be connected to other discourses and practices—the legal-institutional sphere,
daily practice, historical developments and the contemporary political landscape—
in order to embed media in their wider context.13

12
S. Schäfer, ‘Expanding the Toolbox: Discourse Analysis and Area Studies’, in N.-C. Schneider and
B. Gräf (eds), Social Dynamics 2.0: Researching Change in Times of Media Convergence—Case Studies
from the Middle East and Asia (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2011), 145–64, 149 (emphasis in original).
13
Schäfer, ‘Expanding the Toolbox’.

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 Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?  93

The sheer amount of relevant digital media content referring to the two discursive
events presented severe methodological challenges. Without software-supported
big data analysis, it is impossible to include all relevant social media postings into
a qualitative analysis. Even social media big data analyses face persistent issues,
including the prevalence of single platform studies (that is, Twitter), which overlook
the wider social ecology of interaction and diffusion, vague sampling frames,
the socio-cultural complexity of user behaviour and the interplay of online and
offline activities.14 My analysis does not completely transcend these limitations.
For instance, an initial attempt of sampling by the hashtag #pornban for the
period between 31 July and 7 August 2015 produced innumerable related tweets
in random order, so I chose to include only retweeted tweets, assuming their wider
circulation. The major source for the porn ban case are these tweets and additional
blog posts, whereas the Aksa Beach hotel raid case is analysed along online news
reports, blog entries and, in particular, all (50) reader comments to a paradigmatic
mid-day.com news report.15 Hence, my analysis of social media discourse fragments
attempts to avoid the mentioned pitfalls but does not claim to be comprehensive
and rather offers exemplary insights into the discussion.

Obscenity and Nationalist Rhetoric

In her thorough analysis of the legal framework regulating obscenity, Kapur states
that the judgment of allegedly obscene material is acted out according to ‘national
standards’ and is, thus, based on cultural grounds. She further attributes relevance
to ‘social purpose’ and ‘community standards’, neither of which is defined in law,
however. She argues that the legal framework suggests an urgency to protect
‘national standards’ against ‘emulation by our writers of an obscene book’.16 The fear
of Westernisation links these attempts to a clearly nationalist logic and a persistent
East–West divide. The cases analysed by Kapur demonstrate a strong negation of
representations of pleasure, which challenge sexual negativity. Her central argument
is concerned with a fundamentally sex-phobic nationalist discourse on legislation,
deeply rooted in ‘culture’ and law.17 In this context, sex is presumably bad, but can
14
Z. Tufekci, ‘Big Questions for Social Media Big Data: Representativeness, Validity and Other
Methodological Pitfalls’, in Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (ed.),
Proceedings of the Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (2014),
available at https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM14/paper/viewFile/8062/8151,
accessed 20 July 2018.
15
S. Devnath, ‘Mumbai: Couples Picked Up from Hotel Rooms, Charged with “Public Indecency”’,
mid-day.com, 8 August 2015, available at http://www.mid-day.com/articles/mumbai-couples-
picked-up-from-hotel-rooms-charged-with-public-indecency/16437186, accessed 31 July 2018.
16
Kapur, ‘The Prurient Postcolonial’, 240.
17
Ibid., 242.
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 94  Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

be redeemed by artistic or social merit, as Guha-Thakurta shows for the case of

Khajuraho’s erotic temple sculptures.18
Women’s bodies functioning as cultural mirrors of national identity is not
restricted to nude figures. Oftentimes, literature on Indian women does little to
challenge cultural premises and, thus, contributes to strengthening stereotypes
of Indian national and cultural identity, particularly with regard to femininity,
gender and sexuality. Postcolonial feminist literature fills a very important research
desideratum by dismantling these stereotypes. For instance, Puri’s case studies
on middle- and upper-class women find that collectively and individually these
women’s bodies and identities are being used to articulate discourses on modernity
and development in postcolonial India. These are the same arenas where anxieties
around the loss of national tradition are expressed.19 These constellations originate
in the colonial context. Women’s issues were integral to the nationalist struggle,
where ‘women’s bodies constituted the locations of contestation between the
cultural nationalists, social reformers and the colonial power’.20 The idea of female
purity, thus, takes a central position in modern nationalist ideology. It is often
understood analogous to the purity of the nation, as expressed symbolically in the
Indian discourse through the image of Mother India or Bharat Mata, a Hindu
goddess equated with the notion of a territorial motherland.21
When we take this image further, the ‘Indian family’ in this discourse stands
symbolically for the nation. Mother India’s children are the children of the nation
and family rhetoric becomes central to nationalist discourse. Hence, the nation is
conceived as a family and the family is conceived as the core cultural principal of
Indian society.
Contemporary controversies about obscenity, consequently, need to be
understood against this conceptual backdrop. Interventions concerning women’s
role and the domestic realm are frequently associated with ‘religion/culture in
danger’ and charges of anti-nationalism.22 The trope of attacks on ‘Indian culture’
and immoral ‘Western’ influences is often related to changes in morally coded
behaviour related to so-called family values. The Shiv Sena’s agitation against
the film Fire, for instance, was inspired by the group’s reading of the film ‘as an
attempt to convert women to lesbianism, which would lead to the demise of the
18
Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories, 264.
19
J. Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 2.
20
Kapur, Erotic Justice, 248.
21
Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’; Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity,
Community; Poggendorf-Kakar, ‘Virtuous Mother, Virile Hero and Warrior Queen’.
22
Kapur, Erotic Justice, 32.

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 Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?  95

Hindu family’.23 Following this logic, kissing in public or allegedly obscene media
representations are constructed in opposition to an imagined Indian morality
and sexual purity. Here, we arrive again at the triangle of morality, family and
nationalism, from where I derive my basic assumption: what is labelled as obscene
and immoral is constructed as anti-family, and anti-family is equated with anti-
national. Hence, things and acts considered obscene are ‘forbidden’ because of
several reasons: they threaten ‘culture’ and the nation, and cause overall harm.
Censorship laws reflect deeply rooted anxieties, particularly related to incitement
of communal violence and triggering sexual violence. Whether it is a colonial
hangover or the paternalistic attitude of the Indian elite as well as the state—or
both—Indian masses are labelled as immature audiences that need to be guided,
regulated and protected from harm. ‘It is the masses that are objects […] of the
process of modernisation. And it is the masses that may most typically be injured
or misled by provocative, obscene, or seditious public communications.’24 Again,
anti-nationalism in the form of sedition presents an exceptionally severe offence.
A Human Rights Watch report on the suppression of dissent in India states,

The [Indian] government uses draconian laws such as the sedition

provisions of the penal code, the criminal defamation law and laws dealing
with hate speech to silence dissent. These laws are vaguely worded, overly
broad, and prone to misuse, and have been repeatedly used for political
purposes against critics at the national and state level.25

The entanglement of obscenity and sedition dates back to a cross-cutting of

nationalist, linguistic, communal and moral–sexus concerns in the late colonial
era. ‘It is during this period that “obscenity” formally emerged as a category of
regulation, and as a category that was understood as implicated in “sedition”, that
is, in explicitly political forms of provocation.’26
Although obscenity laws exist in various countries across the globe, their
enactment in the form of censorship usually originates in a political atmosphere,
where notions of national culture appear challenged and contested. Gupta has
vividly demonstrated this for late colonial India by showing how the escalation of

23
Ibid., 86.
24
W. Mazzarella and R. Kaur, ‘Between Sedition and Seduction: Thinking Censorship in South
Asia’, in R. Kaur and W. Mazzarella (eds), Censorship in South Asia. Cultural Regulation from
Sedition to Seduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 1–28, 20.
25
Human Rights Watch, ‘Stifling Dissent: The Criminalization of Peaceful Expression in India’,
updated 24 May 2016, available at https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/05/24/stifling-dissent/crim-
inalization-peaceful-expression-india, accessed 16 July 2018.
26
Mazzarella and Kaur, ‘Between Sedition and Seduction’, 14.

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 96  Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

sexually repressive practices mingled with heightened communal mobilisation and

the attempt to create a ‘civilised’ and sectarian Hindu identity against the colonisers’
allegation of an uncivilised degenerate culture as well as against Muslims as the evil
Other. Reform groups like the Arya Samaj and Sanatan Dharma staged agitation
against ‘bad customs’ combined with anti-Muslim campaigning and a gendered
imagery foregrounding the icon of the mother.27 In her work, Gupta traces
how—in line with the linguistic standardisation of Hindi versus Urdu—eroticism
and obscenity in literature were attacked as markers of a decadent, feminine and
uncivilised culture.28
The contemporary Hindu right’s claim to the correct idea of the Indian nation
starkly resembles the historical scenario described by Gupta. Speaking of Modi’s
so far unmet economic promises, John and Deshpande argue: ‘[H]istorically,
regimes unable to provide bread have had to stage circuses of one kind or another
to retain their credibility.’29 Their article continues by listing highly publicised but
almost content-empty campaigns and programmes, such as the Swachh Bharat
Abhiyan (Clean India Mission), and juxtaposing them to a simultaneous increase
in communal tension, spurred by incidents like the 2016 Maharashtra beef ban
or Valentine’s Day celebrations. The characteristic form of these events is a moral
panic provoked by a claimed insult to Hindu sentiments or ‘Indian culture’.30
The Hindu right’s fixation in the national versus anti-national debate is strongly
on the imagined ‘anti’, while leaving the ‘nation’ relatively empty and blurry as
a concept. Additionally, those accused of sedition are not allowed to speak out
on their conception of the nation.31 It seems not too far-fetched to ask whether
the current political situation is one where the notion of national culture appears
contested. The increasing politicisation of alleged immorality through the Hindu
right and other religious activists further reinforces this perception.
The following section highlights dominant legal perspectives on obscenity
in India and therewith provides a first step towards the intended comparative
approach of legal and popular discourses.

27
Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community, 26.
28
Ibid., 40.
29
M. E. John and S. Deshpande, ‘Emptying the Idea of India’, The Hindu, 2 March 2016,
available at https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/emptying-the-idea-of-india/article8300779.
ece, accessed 2 July 2018.
30
Mazzarella’s in-depth analysis of film censorship encompasses two critical moments of moral
panic in modern India: the early era of Indian cinema in the 1910s and 1920s, and the influx of
provocative images with the advent of globalisation in 1990s post-liberalisation India, which sees
a simultaneous rise of the Hindu right. See Mazzarella, Censorium.
31
John and Deshpande, ‘Emptying the Idea of India’.

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 Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?  97

Indian Legal Perspectives on Obscenity

Obscenity, legal concept used to characterize certain (particularly sexual)
material as offensive to the public sense of decency. A wholly satisfactory
definition of obscenity is elusive, however, largely because what is considered
obscene is often, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. Although the term
originally referred to things considered repulsive, it has since acquired a
more specifically sexual meaning.32

Today, most countries regulate or ban obscene material through criminal law.33
Other mechanisms include regulation through customs, postal service and
certification for movies or stage performances (as is the case in India and Germany).
Countries that enact Sharia law (such as Saudi Arabia and Iran) have special
religious agencies monitoring possible obscenities.34
Past instances in Great Britain where material was prohibited as obscene
or pornographic for the first time by the Obscene Publications Act of 1857
influenced the current legal framework in India. A legal definition of obscenity
was subsequently established in Britain with the Hicklin legal test (1868), in which
the Court of Queen’s Bench35 held that obscene material is marked by a tendency
‘to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences
and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’.36 The ruling made it
possible to label a work obscene not based on the intended readership but on how
it might influence society (particularly women and children). This perspective later
formed the basis of anti-obscenity laws in legal systems in the British Empire.
In the late nineteenth century, obscenity was introduced as an offence under the
British colonial regime and three sections were included into the Indian Penal
Code (IPC).37 Having undergone minor amendments, these sections continue to
exist until today and concern any visual or written material that is ‘lascivious or
appealed to the prurient interest’ or which has the ‘effect of depraving or corrupting
[the] person exposed to [it]’.38
32
J. P. Jenkins, ‘Obscenity’, in Encyclopædia Britannica Online, available at https://www.britannica.
com/topic/obscenity, accessed 11 August 2016.
33
I. Jaising, ‘Obscenity: The Use and Abuse of the Law’, in B. Bose (ed.), Gender and Censorship
(New Delhi: Women Unlimited and Kali for Women, 2006), 116–26, 124.
34
Jenkins, ‘Obscenity’.
35
The Court of King’s Bench (or Court of Queen’s Bench during the reign of a female monarch)
was an English court of common law in the English legal system.
36
Jenkins, ‘Obscenity’.
37
The Indian Penal Code, s. 292 (obscene publications); The Indian Penal Code, s. 293 (sale of
obscene objects to young persons); The Indian Penal Code, s. 294 (obscene acts and songs).
38
Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community, 30.

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 98  Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

In contemporary India, obscenity further appears in the Indecent Representation

of Women (Prohibition) Act (IRWA), the Cinematograph Act, the Information
Technology Act, the Trade and Merchandise Marks Act, the Cable Television
Networks Rules, the Indian Post Office Act and several other laws. Indian courts
invoked at varying times different tests to determine obscenity, beginning with
the English Hicklin test (1868), the Roth test (1957) derived from US law and
the Canadian Butler test (1992).39 Hence, the Indian jurisprudence is highly
influenced by the case law of other countries.
While obscenity is a global concern, there are noteworthy context-specific
variations. Prominent and influential for a global discourse, the debate in the
USA centres around the tension between the 1st Amendment granting freedom
of speech and the applicability of obscenity law. ‘I know it when I see it,’ read
Justice Potter Stewart’s statement in the Jacobellis case (1964, USA), describing his
threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio.40 His explanation why the material
in the case was not obscene and, therefore, was protected speech that could not
be censored did not change the blurriness and relativity of the concept at issue.
In many countries, pornography is the focus of obscenity controversies. In North
America, a strong anti-pornography lobby views pornography as the root of
women’s victimisation, as ‘a form of forced sex, a practice of sexual politics, an
institution of gender inequality’.41 Canada adopted this view and designed a
new obscenity law, influenced by MacKinnon. The debate over pornography,
thus, includes various nuanced positions from anti-porn feminists who equate
pornography and rape with theory and action to ‘sex positive’ feminists who defend
pornography as a right to free speech and sexual expression.42
Although this debate is global in its scope, the postcolonial Indian context is
exceptional, especially due to the role women have been assigned within Indian
nationalism.43 Pro-censorship arguments are prevalent in Indian feminist circles, too.
39
G. Bhatia, Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech under the Indian Constitution (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2016), xxxii.
40
L. Liang, ‘What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Pornography’, The Wire, 4 August
2015, available at http://thewire.in/2015/08/04/what-do-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-
pornography-7811/, accessed 15 April 2016.
41
A. Dworkin and C. A. MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality
(Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988), 46, quoted in Kapur, ‘The Prurient
Postcolonial’, 247.
42
N. Malhotra, ‘Porn, Law, Video and Technology’, Centre for Internet and Society, 2011, 66,
available at http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/porn-law-video, accessed 10 August
2016.
43
Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’; Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity,
Community; Kapur, Erotic Justice; Kapur, ‘The Prurient Postcolonial’.

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 Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?  99

Prior to the introduction of the IRWA in 1986,44 Anklesaria had argued that
‘[b]esides undermining the woman viewer or reader’s self-esteem, the debasing of
women into sex objects results in obscenity spilling over from the screen or book into
reality, and in the perpetration of crimes like bride burning, sexual harassment and
rape’.45 She, thus, takes a stance similar to the anti-porn feminism of Dworkin and
MacKinnon and strongly condemns the portrayal of women as objects and subjecting
them to demeaning and exploitative expression. In order to prevent gender violence
and negative repercussions on women, she suggests monitoring media without
supporting a negative view on sex in general.46 Eventually, the IRWA was introduced
into Indian law to ensure that women are not depicted in denigrating or derogatory
ways. The IRWA was partly the result of feminist lobbying. It prohibits indecency
that depraves or corrupts public morality. Jaising criticises that the definition in the
bill confuses the separate concepts of indecency and obscenity:

Laws prohibiting ‘obscenity’ punish conduct, which is considered immoral

and corrupting, whereas laws which seek to prevent ‘indecent representation’
seek to prevent public nuisance, and an affront to civic sense of aesthetic
propriety. [...] While obscenity laws seek to protect people against
themselves, the law relating to ‘indecent representation’ protects the liberty
of a person to live free from interference of public displays of what is
offensive and indecent.47

The Indian IRWA illustrates that despite efforts at regulation, the term ‘obscenity’
itself remains vague and gendered, as there is no comparable law that aims to protect
men or sexual minorities from discrimination. The gendered nature of obscenity
regulations is a worldwide reality. Existent laws do not target only pornography. In
India, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working on AIDS programmes
were repeatedly accused of spreading immorality and pornography and social
workers were charged under obscenity and indecency provisions of the IPC and
the IRWA.48
Several case studies on Indian controversies suggest that concepts of vulgarity
and obscenity change with historical contexts and under different political

44
The Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986.
45
S. Anklesaria, ‘Obscenity, Media and the Law’, in B. Bose (ed.), Gender and Censorship (New Delhi:
Women Unlimited and Kali for Women, 2006), 49–55, 49.
46
Ibid., 50.
47
Jaising, ‘Obscenity’, 116.
48
Kapur, Erotic Justice, 75, 80.

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 100  Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

circumstances.49 Perhaps the only common denominator is a vague understanding

of obscenity as sexually explicit or erotic content. This vagueness opens up several
discursive layers—above all, the conflict of free speech versus censorship, the
thin line between aesthetic and obscene depictions, and the lasting dilemma of
distinguishing sexually explicit from sexually offensive material.

Obscenity in Popular Discourse

Conventional models assume a fundamental difference between elite and popular
culture or, like the one by Stuart Hall, claim that the sole useful definition of
popular culture is its relation and antagonism with dominant culture.50 Popular
culture in this understanding enables the masses to access culture and provides
them with cultural agency. In times of globalisation, Appadurai and Breckenridge
argue, this narrow conception of popular culture has lost its analytical use.51 In the
wake of global media culture, they proposed already two decades ago to replace the
term ‘popular culture’ with ‘public culture’, defined as the ‘space between domestic
life and the projects of the nation state—where different social groups […]
constitute their identities by their experience of mass-mediated forms in relation
to the practices of everyday life’.52 I expand on this definition in understanding
popular culture in a very wide sense as encompassing all forms of easily accessible
culture, a kind of shared middle ground between the different distinct cultural
formations, neither state-controlled, nor elite or distinctly subcultural or niche in
character. Online media with its collaborative and, at least in theory, democratic
character represents one of popular culture’s most dominant manifestations in the
twenty-first century.
The following two case studies are part of an ongoing popular discourse on
obscenity and they serve to illustrate two forms of censorship: censorship of the
media and censorship of public behaviour. Both cases backfired and served as
unifying causes for people demanding the protection of privacy rights and freedom
of speech.
49
Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories; Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community; Mazzarella
and Kaur, ‘Between Sedition and Seduction’; W. Mazzarella, ‘A Different Kind of Flesh: Public
Obscenity, Globalisation and the Mumbai Dance Bar Ban’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian
Studies, 38, no. 3 (2005), 481–94.
50
C. Pinney, ‘Introduction: Public, Popular, and Other Cultures’, in R. Dwyer and C. Pinney (eds),
Pleasure and the Nation: the History, Politics, and Consumption of Public Culture in India (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 3.
51
A. Appadurai and C. Breckenridge,‘Why Public Culture?’ Public Culture Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1988),
5–9, 7.
52
A. Appadurai, ‘Public Modernity in India’ in C. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 1–20, 4, quoted in Pinney, ‘Introduction’, 7.

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 Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?  101

The Temporary Porn Ban

With the exception of the possession of child pornography, Indian law does
not explicitly prohibit watching or possessing pornography but the production,
publication or distribution of pornography are punishable offences. Before delving
further into the question of pornography, one has to understand that there is no
specific definition for pornography in the law. Censorship is justified based on
the discussed obscenity regulations. Despite Indian courts’ preoccupation with
obscenity and indecent representation, ‘[p]ornography itself in its hard core
explicit avatar’53 has hardly been a legal issue. ‘The existence of pornography and
its circulation is not in question, but this existence was never acknowledged in the
public domain or was a fact that was conveniently forgotten or erased by the courts
and public discourse.’54 The amount of porn consumption in India is difficult to
assess, with internet pornography being a specifically grey legal zone. However,
India being a populous country without doubt contributes a fair number of online
porn users. Pornhub, a popular adult site that streams videos, announced in its
annual report for 2015 that India was third in the list of countries that brought
maximum traffic to the site.55 
Against the background of a vibrant and ‘well-established-but-not-spoken-
about’ pornographic culture—in small-town cinema halls, video parlours and
recently distributed via an exploding supply of pornographic websites—the sudden
crackdown on internet pornography seems to have shocked an entire porn-watching
nation.
On 1 August 2015, a circular by the Department of Electronics and Information
Technology (DeitY) containing a list of 857 compiled websites (issued on 31 July)
was laid bare by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru. An order issued
under section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act (IT Act)56 directed
all internet service providers (ISPs) to disable access to the websites. The order
employed article 19(2) of the Indian Constitution, which exempts contents
harming ‘morality and decency’ from freedom of speech.57 Similar to previous
cases, the regulation of obscenity conflicts with the right to freedom of speech.

53
Malhotra, ‘Porn, Law, Video and Technology’, 42.
54
Ibid.
55
J. Anwer, ‘Pornhub Says India Improves Its Porn Watching Ranking, Now on 3rd Spot’, India
Today, 13 January 2016, available at https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/pornhub-
says-india-improves-its-porn-watching-ranking-now-on-3rd-spot-303620-2016-01-13,
accessed 9 July 2018.
56
The Information Technology Act, 2000, s. 79(3)(b).
57
The Constitution of India, 1949, article 19.

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 102  Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

Hence, the circular is not a blocking order, such as section 69A of the IT Act,58 and
requires justification for blocking access to internet content on grounds of national
security. The IT Act’s grounds for blocking do not include indecency or immorality,
while ISPs are intermediaries, generally known for being over-complying with
government directives. In short, the so-called porn ban did not consist in a direct
governmental ban but a demand for blocking access that the ISPs were overly
enthusiastic to enforce. The move follows from a public interest litigation (PIL)
filed in 2013 by Kamlesh Vaswani, currently being heard by the Supreme Court,
demanding changes to the IT Act and directions for a separate law on pornography
as well as directions to the government to treat the watching and sharing of
pornographic videos as non-bailable and cognisable offences.59 Currently, the mere
consumption of pornography is legal; only the circulation is punishable under the
IPC. In July 2015, in response to a PIL petition by Kamlesh Vashwani from August
2014, the Supreme Court had repudiated banning porn and argued that harmful
content depicting exploitation or non-consensuality, notably child pornography, is
universally condemned and already addressed by the Indian IT Act. With regard to
the porn ban, Liang argues that DeitY lists randomly compiled websites and outlaws
them on grounds of decency and morality, which refers rather to ‘moral paternalism’
than to protecting minors or national security.60
The story of the temporary porn ban made a remarkable turn after users started
to note the ban. That Sunday morning, 2 August, the hashtag #pornban became
a top Twitter trend within hours. The conversation on Twitter was divergent—
some supported the blocking and others ridiculed and criticised the step. It was
ironically called a ‘gift to the nation’ (Figure 5.1), and repeated references were
made to the Kama Sutra and Khajuraho (Figure 5.2) as ‘Indian culture’, thereby
playing with the notions of Indianness and nationalism as opposed to the obscenity
of pornography. Overall, the issue was treated as a national concern, irrespective of
whether one does or does not watch pornography. Accessing pornography turned
into the measuring point for freedom of speech and a transnational cross-media
conversation emerged uniting Indian porn defenders in a kind of temporary ‘ritual
community’.61 An exemplary tweet points out the irony of this sudden democratic
upsurge: ‘Indians divided by religion, united by porn’ (Figure 5.3).
58
The Information Technology Act, 2000, s. 69A.
59
V. Pazhanganat, ‘Husband’s Porn Addiction Causes Wife to Move Supreme Court for Complete
Ban on Pornography’, The Indian Jurist, 15 February 2018, available at https://theindianjurist.
com/2018/02/15/husbands-porn-addiction-causes-wife-move-supreme-court-complete-ban-
pornography/, accessed 10 July 2018.
60
Liang, ‘What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Pornography’.
61
D. Dayan and E. Katz, Media Events: the Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992).
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 Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?  103

Figure 5.1  #pornban 1

Source: Author.

Figure 5.2  #pornban 2

Source: Author.

Figure 5.3  #pornban 3

Source: Author.

In the following days, questions of personal liberty and freedom of speech

made headlines in news, were the topic of television talk shows and were
frequently discussed across the Indian social media and bloggers’ landscape.
Jha and Barman observe, ‘[T]he Reddit62 India community, nothing if not
62
Reddit is a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Registered
members submit content to the site such as links, text posts and images, which are then voted up
or down by other members.

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 104  Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

vigorous, had worked itself into a state of remarkable frenzy.’63 Linking the
porn ban to preceding censorship controversies like the banning of Wendy
Doniger’s book The Hindus, the film Fire and political defamation cases against
novelists Salman Rushdie and Javier Moros, the article concludes, ‘This is the
first important tenet of censorship in India: life choices that do not fall in
line with the censor’s own worldview are quickly branded “anti-social” or […]
“anti-national”.’64
Commentators repeatedly brought forward the Supreme Court’s engagement
with the question of whether a person browsing pornographic websites within the
four walls of his or her home is committing any offence or whether banning web
access is a violation of article 21 of the Constitution,65 the right to personal liberty.66
Summarising the debate on Global Voices, an international and multilingual
blogging and journalism community, a blogger writes: ‘The never-ending debate
continues, with some arguing that adult citizens should be given freedom of choice,
while others argue that the objectionable adult content on these web sites is having
an adverse impact on Indian society and culture.’67
The advocates of the porn ban use a familiar rhetoric of legitimation, mixing
national concerns with human rights language in terms of gender discrimination and
child rights. For example, a Twitter account called @FilterNet posts strongly against
pornography and takes an adamant stand excluding pornography from the right to
freedom of speech (Figure 5.4). The account’s self-description states in Hindi:

(On the net there are crores of porn/blue film sites. Children can become
their victims. Amongst porn victims, India is ranked 3rd in the world, of that
25% are girls.)68
63
A. Mani Jha and R. Barman, ‘How Young Indians Are Growing Up Censored and Silenced’,
DailyO, 18 July 2017, available at https://www.dailyo.in/arts/censorship-laws-india-sedition-
wendy-doniger-bjp-free-speech/story/1/18430.html, accessed 12 July 2018.
64
Ibid.
65
The Constitution of India, 1949, article 21.
66
A. Saha, ‘Porn Ban Debate: “Is Govt Curbing Our Individual Freedom?”’ Hindustan Times,
3 August 2015, available at https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/porn-ban-debate-is-govt-
curbing-our-individual-freedom/story-43JlWry4Gq60SqUBe0DfwJ.html, accessed 10 July 2018;
U. Anand, ‘Background and Legal Aspects of the Ban on Internet Pornography’, Indian Express,
6 August 2015, available at https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/background-and-legal-
aspects-of-porn-block-on-internet/, accessed 10 July 2018.
67
S. Panigrahi, ‘How India’s Porn Ban Backfired and “Brought the Entire Nation Together”’, Global
Voices, 7 August 2015, available at http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/08/07/how-indias-porn-
ban-backfired-and-brought-the-entire-nation-together/, accessed 12 July 2018.
68
Translation by author.
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 Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?  105

Figure 5.4 #pornban 4

Source: Author.

The primary emphasis lies on the harm caused by pornography by foregrounding

children and particularly girls as possible victims, but an undertone is concerned
with India’s national image that might be desecrated by its high number of porn
‘victims’.
Finally, after a couple of days, the government lifted the ban and issued a new
directory to just block access to sites containing child pornography.

The Aksa Beach Hotel Raid

The second case study interrogates the negotiation of public morality from the
angle of moral policing and the censorship of public behaviour. Although, in this
case, media merely provided the platform for outrage, approval and debate and is
not the issue itself, I still argue that the incident turned into a social media event
due to the intense thickening of communication in the aftermath.
Madh Island in the north of Mumbai with its sandy beaches and resorts
provides an ideal getaway for Mumbai’s inhabitants and is one of the rare spots
offering some privacy to couples. The arrest of around 40 couples from hotel rooms
at Aksa Beach on 6 August 2015, thus, came as a shock and a severe intrusion
into the right to personal liberty to the affected as well as many observers. The
couples were charged with ‘behaving indecently in public’, according to section 110
of the Bombay Police Act.69 They were held in police custody for nearly five hours
and fined INR 1,200. Three cases were registered under the the Immoral Traffic
(Prevention) Act that pertains to prostitution.70
69
The Bombay Police Act, 1951, s. 110 (Behaving indecently in public).
70
The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956.
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 106  Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

The term ‘moral policing’ usually applies to vigilante groups, often hailing from
the Hindutva spectrum—but the Mumbai police has gained a reputation for its
impromptu actions against couples in public space over the recent years, exemplified
by the rough enforcement of the kissing ban on Mumbai’s Marine Drive since
2000. Infamous incidents from other regions in India include the Mangalore pub
attack (2009) and attacks in Meerut parks on couples on Valentine’s Day (2005).
In most prominent cases of moral policing, media surveillance and/or documentation
played a crucial role, be it in the form of threats to expose and compromise couples
by means of YouTube videos, mobile phone pictures or by planned documentation.
In Mangalore, a TV camera team accompanied the mob attacking women in a pub,
which effected an immediate upload of the video recording on YouTube. Brosius
describes this as a ‘[v]oyeuristic form of violence that derives from having power
over another person’s personal sphere’.71
Similar to previous attacks, the incident at Aksa Beach fundamentally stirred
up a debate about public versus private. The general idea is that public intimacy
and especially certain behaviour by women (premarital sex; drinking in the case of
the Mangalore pub attack) is morally wrong, even socially destabilising. Several
authors have noted that displays of affection might be acceptable in certain
‘privatized/modern public spaces’—malls or coffee shops—that are clearly marked
as middle class. However, intimacy in public spaces like parks or beaches renders
less privileged couples more vulnerable and, thus, additionally exposes a classist
division in moral judgment.72 ‘Individual emotions are said to colonize public space
and hurt the sentiments of a moral community […]. Within this interpretation,
pleasure becomes lust and obscenity, and lovers in public become public nuisances
and an insult to conservative moral values.’73
Brosius’ interpretation raises the question of who constitutes the moral
community that dictates what is obscene. Conservative Hindus? The police? The
Indian nation? The Aksa Beach incident poses a peculiar case, as a hotel room
is a private space. Nevertheless, the raid was justified with the persecution of
‘public indecency’, and intimacy between unmarried couples was equated with
acts of immorality and even prostitution. I have pointed out a similar rhetoric in
the context of media representations of live-in couples, where references are made
to ‘hook-ups’, ‘gang-bangs’ and other activities associated with sexual deviance.74
71
Brosius, ‘Love Attacks’, 273.
72
Ibid., 271; S. Phadke, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: Women and Men: Risk and Reputation in Mumbai’,
Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 17 (2007), 1510–1518, 1514.
73
Brosius, ‘Love Attacks’, 270.
74
F.M. Titzmann, ‘Contesting the Norm? Live-in Relationships in Indian Media Discourses’, South
Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 16 (2017), available at https://journals.openedition.org/
samaj/4371, accessed 31 July 2018.
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 Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?  107

The cultural framing refers to notions of respectability and safety. Relating to earlier
allegations of moral policing, the then Commissioner of Police, Rakesh Maria,
stated in a press note: ‘Anti-eve-teasing squads have been made for the safety of
women/girls in crowded places, and especially during the festive season of Ganpati
and Navratri.’75 His justification of public surveillance rests upon the protection
of female respectability and sexual purity. Phadke argues that the discourse of
safety for women is a discourse of sexual safety, and the possible risks to women in
relation to public space include the risk to damaging one’s reputation and to being
blamed.76 Khan recently reaffirmed:

[M]any young women talk of the ‘perceptual maps’ that they carry around
in their heads which help them negotiate public space, not only in terms of
safe-unsafe, but also where they could be seen as ‘respectable’ and where not.
Danger is not just reported incidents of sexual assault, it’s also present in the
perceived threats and fears that dominate a woman’s life.77

Much in line with these discourses, media reported predominantly on the effects
that the Aksa Beach incident had on the affected women. For instance, mid-day.
com reports:

More than 40 couples were rounded up and taken to the police station,
where they were insulted and some of them, especially college students, were
made to call their parents. […] Traumatised by the incident, a 19-year-old
girl told mid-day that she is contemplating committing suicide because of
the stigma and because her parents aren’t talking to her anymore. Another
21-year-old girl, who had gone to a hotel with her fiancé, whom she is
supposed to marry next month, says she was slapped by a female constable
for daring to protest against the action.78

The news report dramatically highlighted negative effects. Verbal insults, physical
violence by the police and, above all, the repeated involvement of the couple’s
parents represent severe threats to the affected. The ‘stigma’ and her family ousting
her caused the suicidal tendency reported by one affected girl. The framing of the
news report reveals the discourses in which the police action is embedded and
75
S. Vaktania, ‘Mumbai Police Not Moral Police, Says Rakesh Maria’, mid-day.com, 18 September
2014, available at https://www.mid-day.com/articles/mumbai-police-not-moral-police-says-
rakesh-maria/15612180, accessed 31 July 2018.
76
Phadke, ‘Dangerous Liasons’, 1511.
77
S. Khan, ‘On India Being Labelled the World’s Most Unsafe Country for Women’, The Hindu,
10 July 2018, available at https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/motoring/when-perception-
is-reality/article24379321.ece, accessed 18 July 2018.
78
Devnath, ‘Mumbai: Couples Picked Up From Hotel Rooms’.

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 108  Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

through which it receives social legitimation: protecting social norms, family values
and, particularly, a regulation of unmarried women’s behaviour. So-called anti-risk
measures in effect counteract women’s empowerment and might prevent them
from living the way they want. Commissioner Maria’s ‘anti-eve-teasing squads’
then may turn into surveillance tools that could go wrong. The law supports the
dominant sexual ideology and does not protect women’s sexuality when considered
public or deviating from dominant norms, that is, consensual sex outside marriage,
same-sex relations or commercial sex. Hence, marital relationship emerges as the
exclusive site of legitimate sexuality and the core of Indian culture.79
The discussion in the aftermath of the incident showed clearly that the police
action was widely regarded as a violation of fundamental rights and calls became
loud to abolish or rewrite section 110 of the Bombay Police Act, since—like the
obscenity law in the IPC—it does not define what indecency actually is. Among 50
comments posted in response to the mid-day.com news report, only 5 were openly
approving of the police action. The majority of the comments condemned the raid,
particularly its justification of protecting ‘public’ order within the privacy of hotel
rooms. ‘They MUST come out with their definition of “Public places”,’ comments
user Chandan Laxman Gade (13 August 2015).
Another recurrent theme was the linking of moral policing with fundamentalism;
particularly ‘talibanisation’ was repeatedly mentioned.

People who say consentual [sic] sex in hotel rooms is wrong and against Indian
culture, do you even know what true Indian culture is, or was? We Indians
used to be more liberal two thousand years ago. Now we are just a reflection
of Taliban like extremist factions. (Posted by user ‘Shri’, 9 August 2015)

Islamic fundamentalism in this context represents a negative counter-example

of what is supposed to shape Indian society and, thus, reflects anti-Indianness.
Occasionally, commentators refer to Hindu nationalism as a conservative and
extremist force, but the construction of an Islamic Other is far more prevalent.
This view resembles the line of argumentation related to the erotic sculptures of
Khajuraho by painting a glorious Indian tradition of liberalism before the arrival of
Islam and British colonialism. Kapur points out that references to both a ‘glorious’
and a ‘tolerant’ Hindu past exclude Muslims.80 She unravels the communalisation
of sexuality in terms of equating the sexual and religious Other. In her example,
homosexuality is framed as anti-national, anti-Hindu and, hence, represented by
the Muslim as externalised enemy.81 Similar to counter-cultural moves of arguing
79
Kapur, Erotic Justice, 33.
80
Ibid., 89.
81
Ibid., 81.
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 Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?  109

homosexuality has always existed in India; the defenders of personal liberty and
the right to privacy and sexuality employ cultural arguments claiming a liberal
Indian tradition in opposition to Islam. Finally, the allegation of ‘aping Pakistan’
(posted by user pereira, 9 August 2015) is not missing either from the mid-day.com
comments section.

Conclusion
The discursive relationship of obscenity and nationalism plays out in the legal and
popular sphere, but takes on a slightly different form. Nevertheless, a comparison
of these discourses affirms my hypothesis of obscenity being a gendered concept,
an observation that is valid for legal and popular discourse. The gendered
conceptualisation of obscenity is based on cultural and, consequentially, legal
notions of sexuality. A sexphobic nationalist discourse on legislation is deeply rooted
in ‘culture’ and law.82 The legal approach towards sexuality in general and women’s
sexuality in particular is not only informed by sex negativity, but also inherently
paternalistic. The dominant perspective of women as the weaker sex and in need of
protection manifests itself most explicitly in the adoption of the IRWA, which was
introduced to ensure that women are not depicted in denigrating or derogatory ways.
Similar to the anti-pornography argument, the IRWA is based on a protectionist
approach towards women. While feminist advocates based their lobbying on a
language of human rights and attempts to end the objectification of women, the
Hindu-nationalist proponents lobbied for the IRWA in the context of assumed
monolithic cultural codes of sexuality and obscenity in opposition to the
promiscuous West. As a result, the IRWA has led to an increase in censorship,
but it is difficult to distinguish feminist and Hindu-nationalist positions here, as
censorship suppresses all kinds of sexual representations, not just sexist images.83
One eventual outcome is a general suppression of representations of female
sexuality, which, in turn, denies women’s sexual agency.
Popular discourse accommodates a diverse spectrum of opinions and arguments.
Incidents of moral policing show that women are more vulnerable as they are
burdened with greater expectations regarding normative behaviour. The porn
ban generated a discussion on the constitutional right to personal liberty versus
the negative impact of pornography on society, in particular on women and
children. Whereas personal liberty is a non-gendered right—and was defended for
both men and women—advocates of the porn ban use a rhetoric that mixes
nationalism with human rights language in terms of gender discrimination by
82
Kapur, ‘The Prurient Postcolonial’, 242.
83
Ibid., 250.
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 110  Fritzi-Marie Titzmann

projecting girls as the major victims of porn. In the aftermath of the Aksa Beach
hotel raid, media reported predominantly on the negative effects the raid had on
the affected women. The ensuing debate among internet users pertained to moral
policing, which I have shown as framed in terms of protecting Indian values and,
consequentially, women’s purity by equating safety with surveillance. Given the
wide variation in context, actors and audience, it is difficult to carve out a defined
notion of gender in the analysed fragments of popular discourse. These discourse
fragments nevertheless draw on gendered notions of obscenity, but the analyses
yield rather a wider range of gendered references than a stark distinction from the
legal discourse, as both link the discussion to nationalism and culture.
This chapter further examined whether in the two case studies the allegedly
obscene material or behaviour is constructed as anti-national or anti-Indian. The
result is rather ambiguous. In summary, the Aksa Beach hotel raid incident as well
as the porn ban united citizens and media in favour of free speech and the right to
privacy. The debates intensified by taking place in digital space, thus turning these
incidents into (social) media events. Although the justification of moral policing
and banning porn rests on certain ideas of morality and culturally appropriate
behaviour—which is picked up by the few supportive posts—and it is backed
by respective legal provisions, there was no open accusation of anti-nationalism
anywhere in the official media reports or the reader comments. It is rather the
subtle undertone that reveals anxieties about the family or ‘Indian culture’ being
threatened.
On the other hand, an obvious concern in relation to obscenity is what
contemporary India should be like—to both adversaries and defendants of the
porn ban and moral policing. The rhetoric of legitimisation sounds strangely
alike. In Kapur’s words, ‘[B]oth sides of the debate are draping themselves in
the cultural flag’,84 and culture is invoked to either legitimise or delegitimise
sexual speech, depiction or acts. In this sense, the rhetoric of defending porn or
speaking out against moral policing reveals a vision of what should characterise
the Indian nation: a liberal handling of sexually explicit materials, personal liberty
and freedom of expression. Frequently, this is backed up by a clear rejection of
religious fundamentalism (Hindu or more often Muslim) and claims to globalised
modernity as well as a liberal and tolerant past. Commentators refer to a liberal
sexual past symbolised by the artwork of Khajuraho and the erotic writings in the
Kama Sutra to support these claims. Interestingly, the theme of contagion and
contamination of Indian culture is constantly invoked by all sides. Kapur states

84
Kapur, Erotic Justice, 56.

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 Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?  111

that arguments around culture are about authenticity and the crucial question of
who constitutes authentic Indianness.85 Do not all sides risk essentialising and
authenticating Indian cultural values as opposed to a postcolonial hybridity, which
conceptually renders ‘uncontaminated values’ impossible?86 Since culture and
sexuality are essentially fluid and shifting categories, the ‘national’ or ‘anti-national’
and obscenity are entangled in complex and multi-layered ways with both concepts
remaining blurry and highly contested.
The discussed examples further show that the obscenity argument (and the
related law) is too often invoked to pursue the interests of certain groups, prohibit
socially deviant behaviour or implement conservative moral rules. Hence, it is
important to keep in mind that many of the controversies around obscenity (in
art, literature, online media or behaviour) are closely connected to the right to
freedom of speech and expression,87 which exists to enable people to question and
challenge dominant social mores. The porn ban was enacted by the employment of
article 19(2), which exempts contents harming ‘morality and decency’ from the
freedom of speech.88 It is my contention that the law is being misused in a way
that gives an unequal system sustenance. As noted earlier, Indian law takes on
a paternalising approach towards women, but there is no law comparable to the
IRWA for men or sexual minorities. Gendered stereotypes of women in need
of protection, of strong men and of non-existent sexual minorities are, hence,
perpetuated. The judiciary and police broadly act along these lines, whereas media
reflect an ongoing multi-faceted debate within Indian society.
In conclusion, the title of this chapter—‘Is Sexuality Anti-Indian?’—has
to be answered with a clear ‘no’ but for this ‘no’ to turn into a discursive reality,
I join Ratna Kapur in her call for sexual representations that do not negate female
or non-heteronormative sexualities and, thus, reflect a positive perspective on
Indian sexualities. In this vision, debates around obscenity will be replaced by
much-needed debates about sexual violence, gender inequality and sexual rights.

85
Ibid., 90.
86
Ibid., 88.
87
The Constitution of India, 1949, article 19(1)(a).
88
The Constitution of India, 1949, article 19(2).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108991735.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108991735.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press